Luminar, Volvo deepen autonomous vehicle partnership

Business news | June 19, 2018

By Rich Pell

Data Acquisition Digital Signal Processing Automotive RF transmission Software & Embedded tools Optoelectronics Test and Measurement Sensing / Conditioning

The company announced that Volvo is the first of its partners to leverage its “perception development platform” – an expansion of Luminar’s core sensing technology. In addition, Volvo’s recently established Volvo Cars Tech Fund announced that it had made a “significant” investment in Luminar.

“Volvo is at the forefront of autonomous vehicle development, and their safety-centric approach to autonomy is directly aligned with our sensing capabilities,” says Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell. “Our LiDAR is the first to deliver the necessary performance to enable safe and reliable long-range perception, which is required to unlock their goals of autonomy at highway speeds.”

Luminar’s “perception development platform” includes 3D LiDAR data infrastructure, labeling, and annotation tools that the company created to take full advantage of what is says is “the new level of data quality produced by its sensors.” To quickly accelerate safe autonomy vehicle deployments, says the company, data sharing and close collaboration will be equally important for those developing self-driving software on top of the Luminar data.

“LiDAR is a key technology for enabling autonomous cars to navigate safely in complex traffic environments and at higher speeds,” says Henrik Green, senior vice president for research and development at Volvo Cars. “Our collaboration with Luminar allows us to learn more about its promising technologies and takes Volvo Cars one step further to the highly autonomous cars of the future.”

Volvo Cars is Luminar’s second publicly announced automotive OEM partner. Toyota Research Institute was the first, announced in September of last year.